The next three days were quite possibly the longest, and the most emotionally charged of my adult life. I have no biological children of my own, but after getting together with Corinna in the spring of 2005 I soon began to love her two daughter a if they were my own. By the time that we got married two and a bit years later, I was thinking of them AS my own, and to be honest I don't think that I could love either of them any more than I do, even if they had been my own flesh and blood.
Although I was terribly excited at the prospect of becoming a grandfather for the first time, I was also acutely conscious of the fact that I was the only person in the family who had a qualification in any of the medical sciences, and as my nursing qualification was to look after handicapped people, the only obstetrics that I knew anything about we abnormal ones, and although I tried to continually remind myself that the human race had been successfully giving birth for hundreds of thousands of years with a fair amount of success, I was only too aware of what could go wrong. The text from Aaron which had cheered and encouraged the others, had done the complete opposite to me, and I was frankly terrified. However I didn't want anyone else to know that so I kept my own council, and went outside for as many cigarettes as I truthfully thought that I could get away with.
Just outside the main entrance of the hospital was a huge, stainless steel doughnut shaped sculpture. There was an engraved brass plaque below it explaining what it was meant to symbolise, but it was so encrusted with pigeon shit as to be illegible. I assume that because it was positioned outside the main entrance to that part of the hospital which housed the Maternity Wing, that the huge doughnut was meant to symbolise the female reproductive tract, but even to my mind that seemed a little crass, and laid it open to all sorts of amusing nomenclature of which the Latin Cloaca Maxima was the least offensive.
Read on...
Read on...
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